Making Love And War

John Ford, who may well have been America’s greatest political filmmaker, was also something of a cinematic anthropologist. He set some of his best films—including “The Quiet Man,” from 1952, newly available in a luminous restoration from Olive Films—in distant lands and dramatized the clash of modern ways with enduring traditions, spotlighting a primal stage of contention, that of a couple in love confronting the extended family.

John Wayne stars as Sean Thornton, a Pittsburgh prizefighter who, distraught after having killed an opponent in the ring, escapes into obscurity by returning to his childhood home town of Innisfree, in Ireland. There, he buys back his family’s ancestral cottage and falls in love, at first sight, with Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O’Hara), a fiery-haired, fiery-tempered farm woman who lives under the dictatorial authority of her brother, Will (Victor McLaglen), a respected landowner and a hulking, earthy brute. Sean’s skeptical compliance with elaborate local courtship rituals, played out in public under the prying eyes of a crusty, alcoholic matchmaker (Barry Fitzgerald), helps him to bond with his new neighbors, but one final trial may prove insurmountable—the obligation to beat Will in a bare-knuckles fight in order to take possession of Mary Kate’s dowry, and thereby of her body as well as her soul. The patriarchal violence is peculiarly mirrored by the presence of a pair of wholesome and witty young I.R.A. activists, whose hint of greater violence in a greater cause suggests just as powerfully that this arcadian paradise isn’t given for free and, rather, must be painfully won.

The pacific relations between the village’s overwhelming Catholic majority and its handful of local Protestants, as well as the ambient violence, are reflected in the cultural politics of another Ford-Wayne collaboration, “Donovan’s Reef” (Paramount and Amazon video on demand), from 1963, set on a polyglot island in French Polynesia. The title refers to the bar that Wayne’s character, Guns Donovan, owns; he and another friend, Doc Dedham (Jack Warden), Navy veterans, helped to liberate the island from Japanese occupation during the Second World War and have lived there ever since. The barroom brawling with their roughhousing fellow-veteran Boats Gilhooley (Lee Marvin) is an antic display of the military power that maintains the peace. Dedham’s Boston-grandee daughter (Elizabeth Allen) arrives with a nefarious plot to do him out of an inheritance on moral grounds, but her bluenose prejudices (not least, involving her father’s mixed-race children) are put to the test when she falls for the hard-living Donovan. Filming during the height of the civil-rights movement, Ford connects racial bigotry to puritanical moralism and links ethnic comity to the intimate dream of love. ♦